I made a joke on X/Twitter after the debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The gist of it was that Biden won the debate by losing it so badly because it finally focused people’s minds on the fact that Trump might actually get elected, and people really don’t want that. At least one poll of the battleground states indicates that my joke might be true.

President Biden registered his best showing yet in a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult tracking poll of battleground states, even as voters offered withering appraisals of his debate performance amid panic within his party.

Donald Trump led Biden by only two percentage points, 47% to 45%, in the critical states needed to win the November election. That’s the smallest gap since the poll began last October.

Other polling shows the exact opposite. In truth, Biden did so poorly in the debate that the Democrats are almost surely going to force him out of the race. There’s a growing revolt against his candidacy among both House and Senate Democrats, with Democratic governors,  and with some of the party’s major donors. No one is in the mood to defend Biden’s projected capacity to serve four and half more years in the presidency, and that’s because it’s an unwinnable and irresponsible argument.

You will read many opinions about what should happen now, but the only thing that seems certain is that Biden is sadly not up to the job of serving a second term, and the verdict on that has already been decided whether Biden accepts in the near term or not. At his age, his cognitive ability will not improve and asking the American people to overlook that is wrong.

That leaves the opposition to Trump is a giant bind. But it could wind up being the best thing that could have happened. At no point in this race has Biden been on any kind of cruise path to victory. It has always looked no better than a toss up, and survey respondents have consistently expressed concern about Biden’s age. Overall, I believe the voters don’t want a rerun of the 2020 election, and they don’t want Trump. If the Democrats run virtually  anyone other than Biden, they should immediately see an uptick in the polling. I believe the same would be true if the Republicans suddenly picked someone other than Trump to run against Biden. The election is close mostly because neither candidate is a good alternative to the other.

In the United Kingdom, the Labour Party was just swept into power in an historic landslide precisely because the people found the Labour candidate acceptable. The other factor was that the MAGA-related UK Reform Party split the conservative vote. We don’t have that benefit in America, so it’s more critical that the alternative to Trump is viable. Biden is not.

Every thing else is details.

I take no pleasure in saying this, but it could be for the best.